There are political trolls on a mission to make us have endless babies. The reward? A medal. After that? You’re on your own
I had run out of murder podcasts on my little run yesterday and found myself jogging through the woods listening to Malcolm and Simone Collins discuss birth rates, why screens improve kids’ mental health and whether “a rise in gays precedes civilisational collapse”. My thinking here is: jogging is awful – you need to slightly feel like you’re running away from monsters.
If you haven’t heard of the Collinses yet, congratulations. These are the world’s premiere pronatalists, a Pennsylvanian couple who have marketed themselves internationally as sort of political trolls, profiled in left-leaning publications wearing severe glasses and one of their four children on their backs. Their primary obsession is getting you knocked up. In that sense they’ll be familiar to any woman who has stood alone at a wedding in their 30s. They are the auntie leaning in with fish on her breath, who grips your arm and tells you time is running out. Except, instead of just nagging your mum, they’re advising the president. They are the girl you went to school with who says she only became whole in childbirth, they’re the colleague who finds your childlessness terrifying and looks at you as if you are an unchained horse, or pigeon in a kitchen, capable of turning over a table or relationship or worse. Unplaceable, vulgar and far too free.
The Collinses contributed to what the New York Times reported as “a chorus of ideas” heard at the White House last month, persuading Americans to get married and have more children. One proposal was to give a $5,000 “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery. Another would fund programmes to educate women on their menstrual cycles so that they might find it easier to conceive. Simone and Malcolm sent several draft executive orders, including the suggestion that mothers with six or more children could receive a medal. Which I guess (in the absence of accessible childcare, supported parental leave, efforts to ensure pregnancy is less dangerous and parenting less disastrous for women’s careers) might be fun? Snazzy worn over a sackcloth tabard, too, reflecting the glare of a red sun, rotating oddly.
One benefit of opening up honest conversations around motherhood is that they remind women of the alternatives
The objective of the pronatalist is to send women back to where they came from. To lever them out of public life and back into the home, where they can focus exclusively on the family. It leads directly to anti-choice policies and results in cases like the one playing out in Georgia right now. Adriana Smith, 30, has been brain-dead for more than 90 days but, due to her arriving in hospital nine weeks pregnant, in a state where abortion is banned, they can’t turn off her life support. Pronatalists want to narrow women’s opportunities and chip away at our liberties, pulling us back in time and ambition to become simply wives and mothers once again. And at that point these people appear, quite quickly, to lose interest – the women have performed their duty, first as vessels, now as homemakers, and after huge efforts to encourage them to have babies, little attention is paid to the health or wellness of either them or their children. Until that is, one of these women dares go off-message, at which point all eyes swivel and return, narrowed.
While the politics of pronatalists like the Collinses may seem niche, particularly to us heathens in the UK, their broader opinions often seem to overlap neatly with mainstream commenters. I’m thinking particularly about those who complain when motherhood today is framed as work – as something difficult and thankless rather than, simply, a project of joy. I myself have been complained at noisily and angrily about this numerous times, after writing about the dreadier parts of parenting, including loneliness, ambivalence and pain.
What I tell the complainers (or what I would tell them, if they provided more than a picture of a union jack and the name KathyKupcake1969) is that I’m able to balance these tricky emotions with the sweeter ones we were promised as girls considering motherhood – the pride, the love, the etc – because I am an adult and contain multitudes. Sometimes they complain in real life, too. An older woman came up to me at a kids’ party saying she was worried that a recent piece I’d written might stop young readers from wanting babies. If I’d been bolder or ruder, or bored, I might have suggested that a column on the agonies of breastfeeding was unlikely to counter the overwhelming messaging that women were only complete and content once they’d had babies. And then I might have said, but also, fine! Fine! Because one benefit of opening up honest conversations around motherhood is that they remind women there are alternatives to the lives their mothers showed them, and the choices that pronatalists insist are a moral duty for women to make.
It was a gorgeous morning. I’d dropped the children at school, and the heat of the day was hovering politely above the blossom – the end of the wild garlic was wilting and bleached with fox piss. I’ve been neglectful of my running recently, having yet to work out how to steal an hour between school drop-off and the office, but yesterday I managed, trotting through the woods with this couple who want to make America mate again yammering in my ears. I ran and ran, and do you know what? I did my fastest 5k yet.
And another thing… Shapewear, skin tech and a century of swimming
Face forward I love the Poog podcast, where comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak take wellness seriously. When they went to London to get their hands on a Lyma Laser, my ears pricked up. If you believe Berlant and Novak (which I do), and Carey Mulligan, who bought one for herself as a prize for winning an Oscar, then this pricey device, which is comparable to a medical-grade laser technology, could sort your knackered face out forever.
Shoulders back It’s educational to learn what’s selling out at Marks & Spencer – a lesson about where we are right now, with regards to our more realistic cultural ambitions. See the viral brown-suede loafer (which I trekked to Brent Cross for) and, more recently, the detachable shoulder pad. These are £15 for a pair (marked left and right), with little poppered straps to attach them to your bra strap. Last spring, M&S launched their £15 “bum-boosting” shapewear shorts with removable cushioning – now the padding has moved upwards.
Take the plunge It’s the perfect weather to go (to an exhibition about) swimming. With Splash! the Design Museum in London is celebrating our enduring love of the water over the last 100 years, with exhibits that include Pamela Anderson’s Baywatch swimsuit, the banned “technical doping” LZR Racer swimsuit and one of the world’s first bikinis.
Photo by AP
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